Games

Though it’s been a while, I think the time has come to revisit one of my previous tutorials: the Mahjong game. For those of you that haven’t read it, the Mahjong tutorial went throughthe stages of creating a very basic Mahjong game: the graphics, the layouts, the boards and all the rest. Since I published this series of tutorials, I’ve been asked about various of features such as hint and shuffle, and have decided that it’s about time for me to add them… so here goes 🙂

Over the course of the previous posts, we’ve built and set up the entire infrastructure for our mahjong game. All that is left now is to create the actual game logic. Let’s start by going over the required functionality. What do we have in this game?

The blocks are arranged in layers, and there can be multiple layers on a given board

In each turn, the player must select two free, matching blocks to remove them from the board

The game is won when there are no more blocks on the board

The game is lost if there are still blocks on the board, but no moves are available to the player

In the previous post, we created a script tag for each block on the board, to help us to transfer the block metadata to the game client. In order to be able to read this metadata, we are going to use one of my favorite jquery plugins: Continue reading →

The next game we’re going to build is a Mahjong solitaire game. Mahjong is a tile matching game which I feel is a natural step forward from the Memory game we created in the previous post, so if you haven’t read that post yet, you might want to give it a look.

Since this is a more complicated game, I decided it would be best to tackle it in several posts instead of just one. In this first post we’ll create the graphics needed for the game. Let’s start by considering what this game needs to include. If you search the web for even a few minutes you will find that there are several versions of this game, each with its own set of rules. To make things easier, our own basic version of the game will use simplified versions of some rules, and ignore others (like score) entirely.

So, I got up this morning to find that my 3.5 year old daughter is busy playing on my laptop. She decided she wants to play so she found the CD for her game, opened the DVD drive and loaded her game. She was very busy playing when I got up, and needless to say I was quite surprised. I figured it was time to create some new games for her, so I thought I’d start with a basic Memory game (some may know it as Concentration). You know, the one with lots of face down cards where you need to find pairs of matching cards. Continue reading →

As promised, our first tutorial will be for programming a very well-known game called tic-tac-toe. We will start our tutorials with a general design requirements section and since I’m pretty sure you all know this game it’s going to be a very short one for now.
So what do we need from our game? Continue reading →